Media content communications over a variety of networks, such as packet-based networks, mobile telephone networks and others have increased at an astonishing rate over recent years. The affordability and availability of computers, telephones, wireless devices and other network access appliances has made their use prevalent in a variety of applications. Further, as the demand for network access devices has increased, the diversity in types of network access appliances has also increased, with different devices often implementing different protocols and performance-based operational characteristics.
As access to packet-based networks such as the Internet becomes easier, convenient and readily available, these networks are increasingly used for transferring media content such as images, audio, email, video and text. In this regard, the number of network subscribers, media content providers, and requests by those subscribers for media content transfer, streaming media content and other content are growing exponentially. Users are increasingly relying upon such networks for media content transfer, and are further placing higher expectations on their ability to access content at different locations using different network access devices in a flexible, controllable manner.
Media content (e.g., audio, images or video) has evolved in application, is often stored electronically and is readily transferable over packet-based networks as described above. For example, the storage of music and/or video in rewritable electronic media has become a popular method in which to maintain and access media collections. For video applications, digital recording and storage of television and personal video collections has become popular, as has the streaming (via the Internet) of stored video. Similarly, audio is often stored in electronic media, transferred to portable devices or streamed via the Internet using a packet-based approach to provide the audio to an Internet device such as a computer.
In many applications, user access to media content by users owning or subscribing to the media content, or by guests with whom a user wishes to share her or his content, is desirably flexible and controllable. For example, owners of digital audio content often desire access to their content from a variety of different devices, such as a personal audio player, an automobile audio system, or a home audio system. However, previous approaches to media access and sharing have often been limited in the ability to deliver media content to different devices, over different communications mediums and in different formats. For instance, certain types of media require a particular type of software or hardware in order to facilitate playback. In addition, some media content requires a relatively large amount of bandwidth in order to play the media at a desirable quality.
As may be related to the above challenges presented by the storage of and access to digital media, managing and accessing digital media collections including disparate types of media content in different formats, for playback at different types of devices, can also be challenging. For instance, for audio content, the audio is often stored in different formats, depending upon characteristics such as the audio source, the type of audio or user selections made in purchasing and/or storing the audio. One characteristic of stored audio format is the bitrate at which the audio is stored; higher bitrate generally requires larger memory and, where streamed over a packet-based network, generally requires higher bandwidth. Applications involving insufficient memory storage or insufficient bandwidth may be unable to access and playback audio content stored at a high bitrate. In this regard, users often store audio content in different formats, such as a lossless format for home audio use, and a lower bitrate for use with mobile digital audio players such as flash memory-based players. These disparate formats can become difficult to track, relative to one another, and difficult to access in a manner that is readily understood and that facilitates the provision of the audio in a proper format for a particular application.
Effectively and efficiently making content and other media content readily accessible has been challenging in the face of the advancement of technologies and trade channels that use or could use network-based media transfer.